History Of The Cold War 'Change places! ' So around 1953 a lot of things happened to the leadership of both superpowers. Harry Truman , who had proved to be unfortunately inexperienced at foreign policy (despite the fact that he had more sense than MacArthur in that he thought dropping the Bomb on China was a bad idea), was out as president. Dwight D Eisenhower was sworn in in his place on a strong anti-communist platform. As the former Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in the Second World War Senator McCarthy couldn't even begin to claim that he was soft on commies, which gave Ike much more room to decide his own foreign policy, unlike Truman who'd been pressured into a tough stance by the McCarthy brigade . It was Eisenhower that pushed the disastrous Korean War towards a close in the same year that he was sworn in. Much more important than Ike Eisenhower's presidency is the death of Josef Stalin in March of 1953 in suitably horrific circumstances. With his death, the Western World let out a sigh of relief.

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